In the San Gabriel Valley north of Los Angeles, there’s a brewery that casts a shadow, figuratively and literally, on the local landscape: the Anheuser-Busch plant opened in 1954, occupying a ninety-four-acre swath of the city of Van Nuys.
Tanks and silos are easily visible from the nearby freeway. Railroad tracks crisscross the neighboring streets bringing materials to the 1.7 million-square-foot brewery. Some 275 trucks visit daily to pick up the more than thirty brands of beer brewed under the AB umbrella. The Bud Light is beechwood aged in 4,000- barrel lagering tanks; there are sixteen such tanks in the cellar. The plant makes beer on an industrial scale. One mile away at Cellador Ales, the beer is made very differently: one barrel at a time. Founded by husband and wife team Kevin and Sara Osborne in 2014, Cellador was built as an outlet for creative energy and entrepreneurial spirit.
All the beer made at Cellador is fermented in oak, and the small brewery space is filled wall-to-wall and floor-to-rafters with stacks of mostly wine barrels sourced from California’s Central Coast with a few choice spirit barrels mixed in. No stainless-steel fermentors or brewhouse is in sight, and all the wort is produced off-site. Much of the beer is re- fermented with fruit sourced from around California, and everything from sour cherries to heirloom varieties of peaches from the renowned Masumoto Family Farm to carrots flavor Cellador beer. Getting all that fruit into wine barrels requires some special tools (namely a restaurant-grade immersion blender and a powerful juicer), but it’s getting the finished beer out of the barrels that’s the real trick.